Additional information
by E. M. Forster (Author), P. N. Furbank (Introduction by)
A beautiful Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics hardcover edition of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, with an introduction by P. N. Furbank.
Britain's three-hundred-year relationship with the Indian subcontinent produced much fiction of interest but only one indisputable masterpiece of English literature: E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, published in 1924, at the height of the Indian independence movement. Centering on an ambiguous incident between a young Englishwoman of uncertain stability and an Indian doctor eager to know the English better, Forster's book explores, with unexampled profundity, both the historical chasm between colonizer and colonized and the eternal one between individuals struggling to ease their isolation and make sense of their humanity.
Author Biography
EDWARD MORGAN FORSTER was born in London in 1879 and attended King's College, Cambridge, starting in 1897. In his obituary The Times called him 'one of the most esteemed English novelists of his time'. He wrote six novels, four of which appeared before the First World War, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), and Howard's End (1910). An interval of fourteen years elapsed before he published A Passage to India, which won both the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Maurice was published posthumously in 1971. Forster also published two volumes of short stories; two collections of essays; a critical work, Aspects of the Novel; The Hill of Devi (a record of two visits to the Indian State of Dewas Senior); two biographies; two books about Alexandria; and, with Eric Crozier, the libretto for Britten's opera Billy Budd. He died in June 1970.
